Preposterous Healthcare Costs Prevent Us From Having A Better Life
A huge chunk of our savings are spent on private healthcare
We deserve a good quality, affordable healthcare system and not one that denies us crucial, essential healthcare simply because it's too goddamn expensive. Right now, as things stand in my country, the price of private healthcare is insanely high and there's been recent news of a hike in medical insurance as well. This is a huge problem because for many people, they have no choice but to go to private hospitals because there are long waiting lists at government hospitals due to overcrowding.
The government has been very negligent in how it's managed the public health care service. The number of public hospitals and facilities are just way too low, and yet many people in this country can't afford private health care. Their socioeconomic positions aren’t high enough to afford the exorbitant private healthcare costs, hence the overcrowding and long waiting lists at public hospitals.
People are forced to resort to the private sector for the sake of their lives
At the same time, because a lot of people require much-needed medical procedures and treatment sooner rather than later, and can't afford the really long wait for a place in public hospitals, they have no choice but to resort to the private sector. This causes them huge financial strains and really digs into their savings, which are already low thanks to low wages, a poor social welfare net, and so on.
People have less savings to improve their standards of living
This means they’ll have less amount of money to spend towards other things that are important to them, or just improving their quality of life. For those who are middle-class or poor, they’ll have less savings to spend on more material gains and upgrade certain aspects of their lives so they can live fairly comfortably....which is perfectly within their rights.
And the fact that private health care in the country is so cruelly high...it prevents people from spending money in such ways. They’re forced to reserve a significant portion of their hard-earned money, and whatever savings they have in case of any medical emergencies that force them to go to the private sector.
The public healthcare sector should be much, much stronger
I think this is a huge injustice and a real shame. It's completely unfair, especially for those in the low and middle-income classes.
If the government had any conscience, if the government cared even a little bit about the people, they would invest more money in strengthening and developing the public healthcare sector by building more public hospitals and encouraging more doctors to remain in the public sector by paying them more and ensuring more equal distribution of doctors between public hospitals so that they aren't burdened by excessive workloads due to overcrowding and so on.
There's a lot of that happening, whereby the work-life balance is quite messed up for many people in the public healthcare sector. Many doctors in the public sector are heavily burdened, which very understandably makes them move to the private side because they have better pay and less burdens and an overall better quality of life over there.
Any excuse of a lack of resources or funds is completely unacceptable
So yeah, the government needs to seriously look into this matter and give it the high priority it deserves. The government will keep on giving stupid excuses, like, ‘there's not enough money’, etc. Well, that's on them, that's their fault. It's the fault of the political system and the way it's set up. It's their fault there's not enough money to strengthen the public healthcare sector to the level that the common people deserve.
What they should do is transfer the wealth within the country from the rich to the poor and place higher taxes on the rich and the multinational corporations and use that money to provide much more public hospitals and clinics so people can go there instead of resorting to the private sector to meet their healthcare needs and getting robbed of their hard-earned money to due sheer corporate greed.
So yeah, that's what I wanted to say about that. This is no trivial matter, seeing how affordable, good quality healthcare is a human right. And the fact that many people are still struggling to get it in this day and age really is a huge travesty and must be stopped immediately.
"If the government had any conscience, if the government cared even a little bit about the people..."
I think this is the crux of the matter and why health care costs are going up worldwide. Governments don't care about ordinary working people, because politicians don't care. Politicians care more about making billionaires and other oligarchs happy with tax breaks, etc., so that politicians can reap some of that billionaire money for themselves. Until we outlaw all billionaires/oligarchs and eliminate any influence they may have on government, I'm afraid we're going to fail in our attempts to lower health care costs for the ordinary people. #EatTheRich
Private health care will away be better. It will always be profitable to provide that better health care unless you prevent them from giving that better care. People will always seek to get that better health care driving up prices more. By the time what they have come up with to make it better reaches the public system those private provider are have moved on to doing it in an new better way and have and even better product to offer that everyone want instead. The best health care will always be expensive as a result and people will constant demand that they get the best quality